There are many situations in which it is necessary, useful, convenient, or cost-effective for some individuals to have rapid access to information available to others, particularly current information. For example, in a hospital setting a physician who refers a patient to a laboratory or specialist department for diagnosis or testing often has to wait an extended period of time for a report of the test results to reach him before he can procede with the indicated treatment for that patient. Studies in large general hospitals indicate that it takes about twenty-four hours for the average dictated radiological report to be distributed to the relevant patient's chart and even longer for the referring physician to obtain the requested results. The time is even greater in small hospitals. The delay between the interpretation of test results and access to that interpretation by those who most want and need it is a serious problem in the cost and effectiveness of health care delivery. Indeed, the delay often produced by the time it takes to assemble and transmit information is the cause of serious and costly problems in business, in industry, and elsewhere.
Heretofore, a variety of solutions have been proposed to meet this widespread problem. In the hospital setting, for example, it has been suggested that storing test results in computer memories would make such results rapidly available to those who wanted them through cathode ray tube readout terminals in several hospital locations. But this is a relatively costly solution and as a practical result the number of available terminals would be limited. Further, access to report results and other information would still presumably be available only to those actually in the hospitals and only when they are in the hospitals and even then only in those limited locations with cathode ray tube terminals. In addition, studies have shown that such systems are often cumbersome and time consuming to use since reporting physicians must abandon their customary dictation procedures and learn to communicate with the computer on its terms. A radiologist, for example, much prefers to watch the x-ray film he is interpreting than to pay heed to the computer's demands on his attention.
The prior art is best revealed to U.S. Pat. No. 3,286,033 which teaches as a suitable means for the storage and subsequent direct and rapid access to relevant stored information the use of a single magnetic drum with a plurality of recording areas, each of which is accessible by remotely controllable playback means that can produce a playback over telephone lines. However, useful as this approach is, it is not at all applicable to the typical real situation in which many individuals simultaneously wish to make information rapidly available to others by the use of the same storage system, often at the very same time that still many others want simultaneously to have access to various portions of that stored information. Further, in this prior art system, recording channels are preassigned so that when an assigned area is filled with stored information, the individual who has been assigned the use of that area must remove what he has stored previously if he is to store yet additional information. Further, magnetic drums typically contain a relatively small number of available storage areas, so that the system is limited in its storage capacity.